This Monday we will be moving the site to a new server in order to address some problems we are having with the database server. We hope to minimize downtime but in order to set you expectations please expect our community to be down for the whole day!

Once we are up and running our photo gallery will be functional again and we will post a plan to upgrade many of the softwares that run the site which will fix many reported bugs and add some really cool new functionality.

Andy,
none of my business really but I was wondering if you have started virtualizing your servers. We've been doing that with some success. The ability to move server instances to different hardware has really helped in balancing our ever changing server loads. I really haven't noticed any unusual latiencies on the current instance so maybe you are already ahead of the game.

Thank you all for your kind comment. It's always nice to hear such wonderful people from this amazing community!

We have not started using virtualization but I have studied up on it. We pretty much run a standardized setup and are planning a scalable solution for later in the year where we will be using load balanced web servers connected to caching machines, php processing machines, static image servers and MySQL cluster. It will allow us to grow by adding the pieces we need at any single time. Moving sites really does take a lot of work once you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of files and 8+ GB of information. It's not as simple as it was back in the day...

In this case we are moving all the sites off this server and then will get the OS reloaded and move sites back. So we have to do the work twice. That is why having a scalable solution will help. Especially since there are two of us who deal with IT for 10+ forums communities.